Skirmishes and low intensity conflict with the Second Law Of Thermodynamics

August 06, 2013

It’s a curiosity of scientific progress that black holes were postulated decades before a theory of evolution was1. Not only is evolution a latecomer to the party, it also happens to be a straggler when it comes to popular appeal.

Why did it take so long for someone to come up with the idea of evolution? And even after 150 querulous years, why is it that so many people struggle to accept it?

According to Ernst Mayr, architect of neo-Darwinism, the blame rests squarely with Plato2.

Plato believed that the world we inhabit is but an imperfect projection - a shadow - of an ideal world; a flawed departure from its perfect essence3.

For eg., there are rabbits in the world but there also is the ideal ‘Rabbit’, which is perfect and immutable for all time. Real world rabbits do differ from this ideal ‘Rabbit’ - they may have longer ears or differently coloured eyes. But these, in essence, are undesirable deviations from the ideal 'Rabbit', which serves as a conceptual blueprint for how all rabbits should be4.

Similarly, according to Plato, for every living and non-living thing there exists a category type of the same - its perfect version. Every thing in the world ‘strives’ to embody its category type.

As inheritors of the Greek tradition of thinking, we continue to see the world through the lens of this idea - a cognitive bias now dubbed essentialism5.

Essentialism has us believe that the categories we assign to things (and people) have a deep underlying basis to them. Instead of viewing categories as a helpful way of understanding the world, we begin to see them as factual features that are actually present in the world.

Based on this, we expect sharp and pronounced divides between different categories - triangles and squares, but also rabbits and non-rabbits. Any intermediates are only temporary anomalies.

To really appreciate evolution, however, one needs to disavow essentialism and see the world through the prism of ‘population thinking’.

There are no ideal types in the world, only real instances of populations with variations in characteristics. There is no perfect Rabbit form. Moreover, today’s commonplace rabbit form is anything but immutable and could have very different characteristics a thousand years hence, depending on selection pressures.

Evolution, if nothing else, is a wholehearted embracing of variation.

* * *

If essentialism has a professional cheerleading squad, it has to be the advertising industry.

At the heart of every advertising or brand-building endeavour is an exercise in essentialism.

Step 1: Define an archetypal experience or consumer: for eg., the tastiest burger, the sexiest man, the healthiest breakfast, the smartest housewife or the bounciest hair. Step 2: Present any deviations from these ‘ideals’ as sharply delineated and deeply flawed. Step 3: Suggest corrective action, buying the brand in question.

That’s not all. The process of creating advertising, from start to finish, rests on driving wedges of categorisation in a spectrum of contiguous variations: generations of consumers (Gen Xers OR Millenials), proficiency in using technology (digital natives OR digital immigrants), consumer affinity (favorability OR advocacy), brand personality (hero OR sage), and so on.

And it goes deeper still. Unlike magicians, we remain convinced in the magic of our own trick, even after the curtains have come down.

So when thinking about the future of our industry, we continue to resort to the categorical clarity of Platonic ideals.

We dichotomise between creative types and everyone else (We have a monopoly on creativity); between professionally produced ads and user generated content (Nobody would do this for free); between bold visionary ideas and ideas that arise out of research and testing (A consumer can have nothing constructive to add); between ads that look like ads and content marketing (Nobody wants to read, everyone wants to be entertained); between stories and data (Everybody loves to listen to stories); between the eternal kingdom of advertising and the end of all advertising as we know it (Nothing will change! Everything will change!)

Our instinctive response to all problems - including our own - is to seek ‘essences’, to leave no room for intermediates. Our reality remains firmly bounded by our ideas of it, rather than the other way around.

While Platonic certainty served us well in simpler times, the present and the future are decidedly messier6. To thrive in these interesting times, we need to master an ability to experiment with and vary our response to the world, not impose our mental order on it7.

But as long as we continue to see any deviation from the norm as an undesirable (and temporary) aberration and as long as we continue to mistake the map for the territory, we are destined to remain trapped in an essentialist maze of our own making.

July 30, 2013

You may or may not have heard of ‘native advertising’ yet but chances are you’ve already encountered it, and often1.

In a recent survey by OPA, just under 75% of US publishers self-report that their sites featured native advertising, with a possibility of that number reaching 90% by year end2.

So, what is native advertising3? It is a paid-for placement that appears on a publisher’s site or content stream, its appearance being ‘native’ to its visual surroundings. Along with residing on the publisher’s - not the marketer’s - site, it is designed to be discovered and shared in the same ways as regular content. It is also promoted alongside the site’s editorial content, though identified as ‘sponsored content’ or as created by ‘marketing partners’4.

One of the promises of native advertising is that it’ll significantly contain the pestilence of banner ads on the Web. No longer will we have to suffer visually screechy intrusions to our attention, nor will publishers have to sell them for next to nothing.

Native advertising, it is also being touted, could be a saviour for online publishing and lead to a win-all for almost everyone (except, of course, ad agencies who may see their role as intermediaries between marketers and online publishers all but vaporise5.)

It is not all smooth sailing, of course. A drumbeat of opposition comes from advocates of old-school journalism, who revere the rigid church-and-state line of separation between editorial and advertising. To them, this is a textbook definition of a slippery slope6.

* * *

In Game Theory 101, the choice of driving on the left or the right side of the road is often presented as a coordination problem, one in which both players stand to derive mutual gain (and road safety) by mutually agreeing on one, while remaining indifferent to any specific choice7.

But for most of history and up to the 18th century, the choice of which side of the road to ride on was more than just a problem of coordination, it was fundamentally a question of trust.

Which is why almost everyone rode on the left of the road8. In case they encountered highwaymen or aggressors on their way, this placed them with their right arms in the best position to defend with sword or knife. (Paradoxically, staying to the left also made it easier to be the attacked as one would be to the ‘right’ side of oncoming traffic.)

The rise of multi-horse carriages changed this dynamic9 (with the drivers preferring to stay right), but a papal edict in 1300 firmly established riding on the left as the law of the land10.

The French Revolution, which sought to rebuild society based on new egalitarian principles, brought an abrupt end to several artefacts and accepted norms of life. One of the casualties was the left of the road custom11.

Napoleon decreed by royal order that this game of mistrust would no longer be enacted on roads in the European continent. His army was instructed to march on the right side of the road as a sign of trust and goodwill12. This “civilised” practice spread far and wide, though the British and their erstwhile colonies still choose to be left behind13.

The church-and-state line of divide between editorial and advertising in the media, likewise, imposed a Napoleonic bargain in the way we navigate the world of news and information.

It was a coordination game, but also much more. We could safely encounter an armada of oncoming information in our daily lives and rarely have reason to mistrust its sources or intent. We stayed to the right, doffed our hats and chose to engage with content or advertising as we desired, with no worry about mistaking one for the other14.

One consequence of native advertising is a return to a bottom-up pre-Napoleonic state of affairs.

But isn’t this a fatal blow to the idea of journalistic ethics? Won’t we end up swimming in endless torrents of corporate propaganda endlessly repackaged and subverted as editorial content?

Unlikely. As minor league Robin Hoods through the centuries realised, it takes two to play a game of coordination and trust. There are no unilateral decisions.

Our new tripartite pact with journalism and native advertising will definitely not have the crisp starched principles that some of us fondly remember. But there’s no reason to believe it will be any less real, or helpful.

Millions of micro-interactions and negotiations between readers and a daily torrent of news will determine where the equilibrium of this new bargain lies. Far from being a rigid and straight line running only through the organisation charts of media companies, the division of what constitutes the useful and the promoted can and will be made in the marketplace, and by readers.

July 23, 2013

...In that Empire, the Art of the Story attained such perfection that the Decennial Census of citizens was replaced with an Annual Census of all stories found within the borders. Politician, businessman, janitor all knew that having a story that framed one’s life and experiences was the only way to be counted among the living. In time, having a nation of citizens preoccupied with story-building was not enough. The all-powerful Story-collectors Guild decreed that it was a treachery against the empire to trade stories with other peoples and other nations; it was the sworn duty of every citizen to contribute ever bigger epics to the Empire’s formidable stockpile. The Generations that followed continued this arms race, but neglected honing the allied art of telling the stories. Since all were busy every waking hour collecting and crafting stories, there was none left to listen to them. In the Deserts of the West, there can still be found abandoned piles of stories half-buried in the sand; in all the land there is none alive who can narrate them1.

— Šahrzâd, ‘On Mutually Assured Narration’ (1706)2

* * *

Apollo Robbins3 is a pickpocket and a gentleman. A theatrical showman, he returns wallets and watches with the same practiced ease with which he pilfers them4. Often to applause, but always to astonishment.

He is also an uncommon pickpocket for one other reason. Not every plyer of his trade aspires to - or has achieved - Apollo’s ability to unravel and articulate the principles that underlie the art of the pickpocket.

His insights have earned him a dedicated following of neuroscientists (and consulting gigs with the DoD5 and many corporations) and even become the basis for a scientific paper6.

But there’s another lot whom he can teach a trick or two - us aspiring storytellers, if only we can tear ourselves away from our quest for the ‘what’ of stories - their hidden structures, blinkered archetypes and sublimated plots.

Because storytelling is as much - or even much more - about the ‘how’, the telling, as it is about the stories themselves.

Storytelling is about the audience, and about knowing if they are willing to play.

“When I shake someone’s hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left. The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I’m finding out what kind of a partner they’re going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them.”7

Storytelling is about attention, and a narrator’s ability to shape it.

“Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”8

Storytelling is about the sensitivity of the indirect over the direct.

“If I come at you head-on, like this, I’m going to run into that bubble of your personal space very quickly, and that’s going to make you uncomfortable. So, what I do is I give you a point of focus, say a coin. Then I break eye contact by looking down, and I pivot around the point of focus, stepping forward in an arc, or a semicircle, till I’m in your space.”9

And storytelling ultimate’s trick? To invoke a calculus of computational hurdles offered by arcs and curves over the predictability of straight lines.

Pickpockets may move their hands in distinct ways, depending on their present purpose. They may trace a fast, linear path if they want to reduce attention to the path and quickly shift the mark’s attention to the final position. They may sweep out a curved path if they want to attract the mark’s attention to the entire path of motion.10

Neuroscientists think that these two forms of motion engage different parts of the visual system. Short linear bursts trigger saccadic eye movements—rapid but discontinuous focusing of the eyes during which visual awareness is suppressed for intervals as brief as 20 milliseconds—while curved movements activate smooth-pursuit neurons, brain cells programmed to follow moving targets.11

This adaptation makes sense given that a straight line is a relatively predictable path, so your eyes can safely jump ahead, while a curved trajectory is less predictable and must be tracked more closely.12

The simplest way to achieve a captivating narrative is to offer and resolve multiple tangential possibilities, every single step of the way13. Leaving the audience with no obvious straight line to DIY.

For millennia, storyteller and pickpocket have worked the same crowd (often at the same time.) We’ll be the ones losing the plot - by foregoing the sweep of the arc for the misplaced gratification of the straight line - if we seek inspiration from only one of them.